With the private sector shrinking instead of growing, any hope for the economy will likely come from public stimulus. That has fueled a discrete guessing game among investors as to which companies would benefit. After all, it would be nice to have at least a few stocks in a portfolio this December that are green, and not just red, red, red.

With the stimulus package proposed for next year lurching toward $850 billion, or 6 percent of the U.S. economy (last year’s $14 trillion economy, that is, not this year’s slimmed-down version), the discussion is heating up. One thing that hasn’t changed: much of that cash will go toward a smarter grid (or at least bettering the current power-transmission system) as well as rebuilding schools and other buildings with an eye on energy efficiency.

Tom Konrad at Alt Energy Stocks compiled a list of potential beneficiaries that ran from building retrofits to grid infrastructure. Among the retrofitters, he says:

Companies which sell services and equipment for building retrofits should be well placed to take advantage of these programs. Such companies include Johnson Controls (JCI), General Electric (GE), Owens Corning (OC), Philips (PHG), United Technologies (UTX), Waste Management (WMI), and Honeywell, Inc. (HON).

Konrad says he believes that even if an initial stimulus package doesn’t focus very much on improving power transmission, some smart-grid-related companies could see some money later on.

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California chipmaker Sigma Designs is getting into the smart device and energy management market. The company announced today that it signed an agreement to buy Zensys, which makes wireless mesh network chips for residential and light commercial building control systems. Sigma, which makes multimedia chips for TVs, DVDs and computers, said it’s an all-cash deal but did not release the financial terms of the agreement.

Zensys, also based in California, makes single-chip radio frequency (RF) systems using its proprietary Z-Wave communications protocol, which Sigma says has already been used in more than 250 smart products around the world. Wirelessly networked devices can be monitored and controlled for energy management, helping to lower energy costs by controlling lighting, heating, cooling and other systems in buildings.

Many other startups in the smart energy device market, including Trilliant, Tendril, and Adura Technologies, are using the ZigBee protocol, part of an industry-wide collaboration. ZigBee is a formidable competitor for Z-Wave; today, we hear that CenterPoint Energy has received approval from the Texas Public Utilities Commission to roll out 2.2 million ZigBee-enabled smart meters. And in late July, the Texas PUC approved a similar plan from Texas utility Oncor, which will add 7 milliion ZigBee-enabled Landis+Gyr smart meters by 2012.

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Chip companies are starting to offer lower power chips in an effort to help their customers reduce their electricity bills, but further down the pipeline, chip companies are examining how to incorporate energy-harvesting technology into new devices. This morning there’s news that Peregrine Semiconductor is working with Kansas State University researchers on an energy-harvesting radio that never needs a battery-change.

The Kansas State Researchers — Professor Bill Kuhn and master’s student Xiaohu Zhang — decided to use solar for the energy-harvesting radio and they’ve developed a device using a board made of solar cells taken from low-end calculators. The rest of the setup (see photo) includes a low-power integrated chip — originally developed for a NASA Mars project — to store the data, and a radio to transmit the data every five seconds. Technology like this could be used in a variety of sensor networks and control systems, including a building thermostat or lighting system, as well as temperature and stress gauges for bridges and other structures.

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Big players in the lighting market have snapped up startups in recent years at a breakneck pace. Cree acquired LED Lighting Fixtures in March. Lighting Science Group bought Lamina Lighting’s assets in July. Philips spent $5.4 billion on startups between 2005 and 2007 and acquired four LED companies: Lumileds, TIR Systems, Color Kinetics and Genlyte. We’ve rounded up some of the brightest startups working on lowering the cost of LEDs, developing energy-management software, and devising ultra-efficient lighting technology — and raising millions from investors while they’re at it — to see where they’re headed.

SuperBulbs: With investment from VantagePoint Venture Partners, this stealth startup is working on LED bulbs that look like conventional incandescents and use 30 percent less energy than compact fluorescent light bulbs. While SuperBulbs has named the standard 4″x2″ A19 bulb as its first product, it plans to develop a family of bulbs for the $12 billion replacement market.

Oree: Israel-based Oree added $4 million in venture loans last month to $7 million raised in its Series A round of equity financing. In the two years since its founding, the company has secured funding from Silicon Valley Bank, Kreos Capital, Genesis Partners and Gimv for development of flexible, credit-card-sized LEDs for office or retail spaces and LCD displays.

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The New York Times put out its annual Year In Ideas issue, looking back at the best ideas of 2008. Changing the energy landscape and fighting climate change inspired at least eight interesting of the innovations from scientists, inventors, artists and researchers. The list is strong on theoretical ideas and weaker on good ways to actually implement, but hey, it’s the ideas list — not the best business models of the year list.

The Biomechanical Energy Harvester: The blogosphere dubbed Canadian professor Max Donelan’s biomechanical energy harvester “knee-brace power” earlier this year. While it’s an interesting idea, we think more compact devices that harvest smaller mechanical movement — everyday motion and vibrations — will have a chance of being adopted on a larger scale. For example, M2E Power could soon be selling a device that, when tossed in a backpack or purse, can provide an hour of talk time for some six hours of normal movement (about two days), and will cost somewhere between $25 to $40.

Brickley’s Internal Combustion Engine: Mike Brickley tossed out some parts of the internal combustion engine to cut down on friction by 35 percent and his tweaking could potentially deliver an engine that gets 20 percent better mileage than a standard car.

Carbon Emissions Are a Pain: Swiss inventor Annina Rüst developed a translucent leg band that detects your daily energy usage wirelessly (I don’t really get how, and slowly pokes out stainless steel thorns in your leg — ouch! The point is to remind you that you’re over-consuming and potentially relieve some global warming guilt.

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When it comes to the more energy-efficient, twisty-shaped compact fluorescent bulbs, consumers complain that fitting them into some lighting fixtures is difficult, that they’re inordinately fragile, and that they give off an unusual light. So how do you get regular Joes to buy up the greener bulbs (other than stressing that they lower electricity bill costs)? Make them look a lot more like traditional incandescent bulbs — because let’s face it, people don’t like change.

That’s just what GE plans to do. The company is expected to announce tomorrow that it will start selling a CFL bulb — the GE Energy Smart CFL bulb — which is shaped like an incandescent; the company has basically shrunk and scrunched the twisty CFL shape right into the rounded glass bulb form factor. Developed by engineers in the GE’s consumer and industrial division, the bulb will go on sale at Target on Dec. 28th, at Ace Hardware in January, and at other outlets like Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart sometime in April, in time for Earth Day. It’s GE, so they already have a massive retailer partnership footprint.

The idea to make CLFs, and even the more efficient LEDs, look like regular bulbs isn’t new. Philips has more bulby-looking CFLs. Silicon Valley startup SuperBulbs is trying to tackle more difficult task of making an LED look like a regular bulb.

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Boston Power, a 3-year-old startup that makes rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for laptops, has secured a major laptop customer: Hewlett Packard. Under terms of the deal, HP will sell Boston Power’s more energy-efficient, longer-lasting batteries as a premium upgrade for its laptops. Boston Power wouldn’t divulge how much the added cost would be for the greener battery — called Sonata technology, and branded “HP Enviro Series” for HP — but HP told the WSJ that it would be around $20 or $30 extra.

Boston Power thinks the upgrade will be well worth it for customers. The company says Sonata lasts for three years, runs for about four hours on a charge and that the charge fades less than comparable lithium-ion batteries. HP’s massive marketshare is a game-changing win for such a young company, and Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud tells us that the last three years of hard work are culminating in this deal.

While this is Boston Power’s first major deal, Onnerud hopes that potentially next year the Sonata batteries will be the standard option sold for laptops with other partnerships. Onnerud also said that the startup recently created a transportation division to explore how the lithium-ion batteries could be used for vehicles. Boston Power is backed by a total of $70 million from Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital and Gabriel Venture Partners.

During an interview with hedge fund manager and wannabe-wind-developer T. Boone Pickens last month in New York, we got the impression that Pickens was hopefully optimistic that his massive wind project would be able to meet its previous construction timeline. Despite repeated questioning from a group of reporters on the feasibility of his timeline and plan, Pickens remained positive and insisted that, despite any potential delays, the wind farm would be built.

It now sounds like the inability to raise either debt or equity for his plan is making him downright nervous, and he has shaken that initial positivity. Pickens told a group of reporters in New York yesterday that he is “anxious” over the financing.

“Where’s the money is the question. I don’t know how we’ll do it. I’m anxious to see what Obama comes up with. There is no money to finance a wind project now . . . I’m a little anxious.”

I mean, what’s there to be worried about? Just that $2 billion his firm already spent on the wind farm, the $58 million spent on promoting the Pickens Plan, the fact that his hedge fund is down $2 billion this year, and the massive global recession.

“If we are lucky, we will come out with a bill next week that nobody likes.”

With those words, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, wrapped up two days of testimony from auto executives intended to be something like a truth commission for the incompetent but ending up more like sado-masochism in bespoke suits. It leaves one wondering what happens if we aren’t lucky — and generally not looking forward to this week.

It also raises a question. What kind of solution would everyone like?

Enter Chad Holliday, CEO not of a Detroit automaker, but of Delaware’s DuPont. It shows just how far the U.S. auto industry has fallen when it’s getting schooled by a guy who makes freon and spandex. DuPont gets a fifth of its revenue from its automotive division, so Holliday urged executives at a luncheon in Detroit’s storied Book Cadillac Hotel to consider a “Detroit Project” — a new Manhattan Project with all the innovations and none of the bombs.

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IBM and researchers from Harvard University launched a joint effort today to identify more efficient and lower-cost solar cell materials using distributed computing. Leveraging small amounts of computing power from potentially hundreds of thousands of personal computers, this latest addition to the company’s World Community Grid platform will process more than 1 million configurations of atoms over the next two years in search of an organic molecule that can be used to make materials for an ultra-efficient plastic photovoltaic cell.

For each configuration of atoms, IBM Master Inventor Viktors Berstis told us on Friday, the program will calculate “what would happen if sunlight hit this thing,” and then enter information about the properties in a database. The goal is to find a configuration that turns a greater percentage of light into electricity than is possible with current plastic (also called polymer) solar technology. The distributed computing process could cut the time needed to run the planned calculations by about two decades, said Berstis, a senior software engineer and chief scientist for the World Community Grid.

Even at the cutting edge of solar research (we wrote about some coming out of UCLA last week), scientists today can achieve only a little more than 5 percent efficiency with plastic, compared with more than 10 percent efficiency with thin-film silicon. Researchers continue to pursue polymer solar cells, however, because of the potential for much cheaper and more flexible materials that could be used on more varied surfaces than today’s solar arrays.

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